"Normal" is purely statistics, nothing noble or benign about it.

A man I once admired taught a class in psychology when I was 14. He set us loose in a college library and told us to prove we knew how to use the research tools available to us. He said the subject matter was up to us. Of course, I investigated "abnormal' sexuality, because I was trying to figure out why all the people who knew what I liked (tying up girls, being tied up by girls) was "abnormal" - except they called it "sick", "dangerous", "demented" and ... of course... PERVERTED. And when i read the first dissertation I found on "abnormal psychology", it shifted my world. "ABNORMAL", it said, was purely a statistical definition. It did not imply or indicate malevolence or even a threat. What was "normal" was the greatest number of people engaged in one type of behavior in the sample, and to various degrees, everyone outside that grouping was "abnormal" So if your'e in a group of cannibals, and you don't eat other humans, you are "abnormal" in that small subgroup; although (hopefully, please), back in the general population the cannibals are typically at the fringes of the bell curve. To be a Nazi in Germany in 1939 was "normal" And so when we see Matthew Shepherd tied to a fence and left for dead by two guys who considered their own sexual behavior as "normal", but Matthew Shepherd as the freak and the threat - it gives me pause and grave thoughts to realize that we have a mob mentality that is becoming the norm. A year after Matthew Shepherd's death, about the same time abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was assassinated by a military-trained sniper while eating in his own dining room by a guy who said he was "saving the lives of the unborn", two U.S. Marines who were attending the same University as I was under the G.I. bill told me that killing the doctor saved lives. This was how they justified their morality. Killing gays was OK, because their god was going to send they gay guy to hell anyway; killing him now just proved that God had the right idea and so did whoever followed "G"od to hasten the inevitable. That's the same kind of irrational rationalization that allowed this one guy to suggest that all the Jews must die and gather a crowd to help him to those ends. I don't want to be "normal" in many social contexts, because I can see the mob doing much more horrific things than I would ever conceive or condone by my own moral code; and the people who claim that their morals are superior to mine just because they say it is.....seem to be able to justify some gruesome and horrific behavior all in the name of the statistical dominance provided by the shelter of the bell curve. I don't do meds, either. I balked when I asked them why a person who takes opioids is an addict, and a person who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic, but somehow when I take your little blue pill that makes big pharma rich and my penis go to Neverland, somehow this is a noble way to believe that 2 + 2 = 714 because that is what the mob prefers that I think the answer to be. The answer to 2+2 is always 4; no matter what the mob wants it to be. And just because I follow the mob so they don't beat the shit out of me, I cannot make 2 + 2 = 714 on any day, on any planet, to satisfy any mob. Normal is a statistical category, not a psychological declaration of anything benign, noble, or desirable. In a society that can pervert so much logic as this one does, being abnormal is probably the last desperate act of a man who really is trying to salvage his sanity, and even if the mob disembowels me and puts my head on a pike, I can die with a clean conscience Some religious zealot told me that conscience was pretty important to him. I agree with him, even when he is trying to blow mine all to hell.